Paris – Gigaomhttp://gigaom.com
The industry leader in emerging technology researchMon, 19 Mar 2018 12:00:46 +0000en-UShourly1Bill Gates actually gets ithttp://gigaom.com/2015/12/01/bill-gates-actually-gets-it/
Tue, 01 Dec 2015 16:23:42 +0000https://research.gigaom.com/?p=248559It seems that at every UN Conference on Climate Change, the conversation is always about reaching a global deal for emissions cuts. And while that’s all well and good, these theoretical deals are often unenforceable and rely on truthful reporting of carbon emissions (Hey, China!).

So I was thrilled that this year’s conference opened not with arguments about emissions cuts but with Bill Gates’ plan to address climate change, which has nothing to do with with making cuts and everything to do with how to empower markets to make those cuts themselves.

Gates’ announcement does two things. First, it leads a 28 person investment team to provide capital to help promising energy companies get products to market, crossing the so called investing valley of death where many great clean energy innovations die. Second, he appears to have convinced 20 governments to double their energy budgets for basic research. No mention of emissions cuts in any of these announcements.

It’s not that I don’t believe that market interventions like cap and trade and subsidies can help the process. And in terms of fairness, I’ve long argued and shown that fossil fuels have been subsidized for the last 100 years. It’s just that what Gates truly gets is that taxing carbon is not enough.

What the world needs to address climate change is a Manhattan Project like effort to figure out clean energy solutions that are cheaper than fossil fuels. When that happens the market will expedite deployment of renewables quickly and efficiently. And the only way to get those clean energy solutions to market is to heavily invest in the basic scientific breakthroughs that will be required to cleanly meet growing energy demand.

The reality is that doubling countries’ commitments to energy R&D isn’t nearly enough. What’s actually needed is closer to a 10X increase, which isn’t that crazy when you consider the U.S. only spends $5.3 billion on energy research. Taking that up to $50 billion would put the budget where it should be–more than what we spend on health care R&D but in the same ballpark. Think of it as health care for the earth.

Gates authored a paper that he released Monday, that more or less outlines his thinking on climate change and clean energy technology and investment. It’s a concise, intelligent read and I’d point out two tables Gates presents.

The data tells the story and it’s not that complicated. The federal government is a massive underinvestor in energy research and development. The only one that’s really worse is the energy industry itself, which spends a minuscule 0.23 percent on research.

In my time as a cleantech analyst, people sometimes have asked me what I think the world needs to address climate change. And while a carbon tax would be nice or a breakthrough in energy storage would be even nicer, what always sprang to mind as I stared at the 300 plus billion market cap for Exxon Mobil was a 300 billion dollar clean energy company. In fact, I’d take 3 or 4 of them for good measure.

Commitments to emissions cuts aren’t going to give me my dreamed of competitors for Exxon Mobil and Occidental. But Gates’ plan just might.

]]>Snowden: Paris showed mass surveillance doesn’t stop terrorismhttp://gigaom.com/2015/01/21/snowden-paris-showed-mass-surveillance-doesnt-stop-terrorism/
http://gigaom.com/2015/01/21/snowden-paris-showed-mass-surveillance-doesnt-stop-terrorism/#commentsWed, 21 Jan 2015 15:41:51 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=908393This month’s Paris shootings demonstrated that mass surveillance doesn’t stop terrorist attacks, Edward Snowden has claimed in an interview with Dutch broadcaster NOS. “France passed one of the most intrusive, expansive surveillance laws in all of Europe last year and it didn’t stop the attack, and this is consistent with what we’ve seen in every country,” the NSA whistleblower said. French authorities knew about the Paris attackers but didn’t predict what they ultimately did. Snowden pointed out that U.S. authorities knew about the Boston bombers, but that didn’t actually stop the attack. “The problem with mass surveillance is that you’re burying people under too much data,” he said, echoing arguments that others have made about the “base rate fallacy”.
]]>http://gigaom.com/2015/01/21/snowden-paris-showed-mass-surveillance-doesnt-stop-terrorism/feed/7These places were Instagram’s most photographed locations in 2014http://gigaom.com/2014/12/03/these-places-were-instagrams-most-photographed-locations-in-2014/
http://gigaom.com/2014/12/03/these-places-were-instagrams-most-photographed-locations-in-2014/#commentsThu, 04 Dec 2014 00:45:36 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=897897In its annual end-of-year tradition, Instagram has released the places in the world users capture the most with the filter-friendly app. Last year, the big question was “Why is a shopping mall in Thailand Instagram’s most photographed place in 2013?” The answer had more to do with a Thai cultural proclivity towards obsessive photo sharing then it did with the mall itself.

This year the number one location is no surprise to anyone: The Happiest Place on Earth. Disneyland topped the list after coming in third the last twoyears. Other returning champions include Dodger Stadium (#8 in 2013 and #7 in 2012), Times Square (#2 in 2013), and Thailand’s Siam Paragon shopping mall (#1 in 2013 and #2 in 2012),

Although international places have appeared in Instagram’s most popular list since its first version in 2011, their dominance in this year’s list suggest that Instagram is scaling beyond America, becoming popular enough in other parts of the world that foreign locations are photographed more than American landmarks like the Bellagio, Disney World, and Central Park (which were #4, #5, and #7 respectively on the 2013 most popular places list, but didn’t make the 2014 cut).

Without further ado, here’s the top ten list of 2014 with some pretty photos to boot.

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http://gigaom.com/2014/12/03/these-places-were-instagrams-most-photographed-locations-in-2014/feed/2Uber car attacked in Paris taxi protesthttp://gigaom.com/2014/01/13/uber-car-attacked-in-paris-taxi-protest/
http://gigaom.com/2014/01/13/uber-car-attacked-in-paris-taxi-protest/#commentsMon, 13 Jan 2014 09:22:06 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=791305Uber has annoyed many traditional taxi drivers, but none more so than in Paris, it seems. As spotted by Rude Baguette, on Monday morning a protest by taxi drivers on the freeway near the airport turned ugly when several people – not confirmed as cabbies — smashed a window and slashed the tires of an Uber car containing Eventbrite CTO Renaud Visage and Five by Five co-founder Kat Borlangan, who tweeted that she had “bleeding hands” after the incident. This happened less than two weeks after a new French law came into effect to protect traditional taxis, forcing cars from chauffeur app services such as Uber to wait 15 minutes before picking up clients.
]]>http://gigaom.com/2014/01/13/uber-car-attacked-in-paris-taxi-protest/feed/2Cloud emailing provider Mailjet picks up $3.3m for growthhttp://gigaom.com/2012/11/29/cloud-emailing-provider-mailjet-picks-up-3-3m-for-growth/
http://gigaom.com/2012/11/29/cloud-emailing-provider-mailjet-picks-up-3-3m-for-growth/#commentsThu, 29 Nov 2012 09:00:46 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=588972The French cloud emailing platform Mailjet has just picked up $3.3m in funding, which it intends to use to shore up international growth.

Mailjet is similar to the likes of MailChimp and SendGrid, in that it provides a way for companies to send out newsletters and their apps to send out transactional emails. While some of those rivals target marketing departments, though, Mailjet’s sights are trained on relatively small-scale developers that want to avoid the hassle of maintaining SMTP servers and the like.

“Whenever you have a web app you need to code a couple of emails – welcome, subscription, reset password – so it’s a headache for the developer to set that up,” co-founder Quentin Nickmans told me. “So we created a platform that makes it extremely easy for a developer to set up.”

Apart from these functions, Mailjet also provides tracking and ‘deliverability optimization’ of emails, so customers can see whether messages have been clicked on or opened.

The cash comes mostly from Alven Capital, which has put $2.6m into the round, with the rest coming from Airtek Capital Group chief Laurent Asscher and the eFounders incubator, which had previously provided $300k in seed funding.

Because Mailjet is mostly targeting startups, the company needs feet on the ground in each territory. And, according to Nickmans, such presence will also help with dealing with ISPs – essential when you’re trying to make your customers’ emails as deliverable as possible:

“The company has been having quite a lot of traction and… we need to hire more people in support, we need to be closer to our customers. We need to have a couple of people present in Latin America, we want to grow our support team in Canada, we don’t have someone now in Berlin who could be a developer evangelist –we want to participate in hackathons for people to get to know our API, and we want someone more locally based for ISP relations.”

Right now Mailjet has around 10,000 customers (big names include MIT and Fotolia), which it’s amassed since launching 18 months ago. The company employs a freemium model, with payments kicking in once you send 6,000 or more emails a month.

Paying customers also get a dedicated IP address that benefits from reputation monitoring. Nickmans didn’t want to detail the split between paying and non-paying customers too closely, but he indicated that somewhere between 15-20 percent were paying, which is fairly impressive.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2012/11/29/cloud-emailing-provider-mailjet-picks-up-3-3m-for-growth/feed/1Why I am heading to Le Web 2012http://gigaom.com/2012/11/12/why-i-am-heading-to-le-web-2012/
http://gigaom.com/2012/11/12/why-i-am-heading-to-le-web-2012/#commentsTue, 13 Nov 2012 04:15:07 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=583700It is almost a ritual for me — come December, I pack my bags for a week and head to Paris, where I attend Le Web, the must-attend technology conference in Europe. Sure, there are many events — some old and some new — but there is nothing like Le Web for someone like me to instantly refresh and reconnect with all my friends, sources and startups in Europe. Of course, as a side benefit, it is in Paris – the food is great and shopping is fun too.

Looks like this year is going to be a fun event, for the theme for the year — the internet of things — is something that is core to our way of thinking. The internet of things is based on GigaOM’s core philosophy of connectedness and how it changes everything. Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, who organized the conference, just released the full lineup of speakers and sessions and it promises to be a great few days. Just listening to the Tony Fadell of Nest Labs alone is worth it.

The conference will be held on December 4, 5 and 6th. I hope to see you there at the event.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2012/11/12/why-i-am-heading-to-le-web-2012/feed/2Video star Dailymotion relaunches white label servicehttp://gigaom.com/2012/07/18/video-star-dailymotion-relaunches-white-label-service/
http://gigaom.com/2012/07/18/video-star-dailymotion-relaunches-white-label-service/#commentsWed, 18 Jul 2012 10:01:42 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=543966The world’s second largest video site, Dailymotion, is dramatically expanding its white label video service in an attempt to draw in more professional content companies and media creators.

Dailymotion Cloud, a system for hosting video outside of the company’s main consumer platform, announced on Wednesday that it was adding a slate of new features including improved live streaming, DRM support and extra money-making services. All of these, it hopes, can make it a significant competitor to other professional video hosting services like Brightcove (s BCOV) and Ooyala.

Cloud is aimed at offering companies, advertisers and broadcasters access to the same tools that Dailymotion itself uses to distribute video to more than 100 million monthly users. Running on a flexible, usage-based tariff, customers will now have access to a customizable player that incorporates in-stream advertising, HTML5 support, and a range of syndication options.

“We’re proud to compete with some of the web’s biggest video companies, delivering a highly affordable, flexible and robust cloud-based video streaming service,” said the company’s US managing director Roland Hamilton. “Our expertise as a major independent video platform is a great bonus for all of our clients.”

The Paris company first launched the Cloud service back in 2010, and at the end of last year had 2,500 customers on the platform — not enough, apparently, to achieve its target of providing 15 percent of the company’s revenue.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2012/07/18/video-star-dailymotion-relaunches-white-label-service/feed/2Microsoft in the dock over French tax fraud claimshttp://gigaom.com/2012/07/04/microsoft-in-the-dock-over-french-tax-fraud-claims/
http://gigaom.com/2012/07/04/microsoft-in-the-dock-over-french-tax-fraud-claims/#commentsWed, 04 Jul 2012 08:14:30 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=539520A bad week for Microsoft (s MSFT) just got worse. After taking a $6.2 billion hit on aQuantive and facing claims about Steve Ballmer’s “foolish” leadership in Vanity Fair, the company is now in the dock over its tax affairs in France.

Local reports suggest the French authorities are investigating the software giant over claims that it has committed fraud, by secretly routing money through offshore companies to avoid corporate tax — a move which could violate the country’s laws.

French magazine Le Canard Enchaîné made the claims after Microsoft’s French headquarters were subjected to a tax raid last week.

The magazine claims that the authorities are examining whether for the past four years Microsoft has operated “a business aimed at French customers, for the French market, using the human and material resources of Microsoft France and located in France… without paying corresponding taxes.”

Corporate tax in France is currently 33 percent, but many companies — such as Amazon (s AMZN) and Google (s GOOG) use complicated European tax avoidance schemes to route money earned around the continent to more pleasing tax regimes, such as Ireland (where corporation tax is 12.5 percent.)

Avoidance — using loopholes in the law to minimize taxes — is legal if done properly. Evasion — the mis-statement of accounts in order to reduce tax burdens — is not. The French government have spent the last few years trying to crack down on tax cheats and championing the end of tax havens.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2012/07/04/microsoft-in-the-dock-over-french-tax-fraud-claims/feed/2First London, now Paris: Metro gets free WiFihttp://gigaom.com/2012/06/27/first-london-now-paris-metro-gets-free-wifi/
http://gigaom.com/2012/06/27/first-london-now-paris-metro-gets-free-wifi/#commentsWed, 27 Jun 2012 10:16:46 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=536905London and Paris have had a competitive relationship for a littlewhilenow. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that just a few weeks after London announced the rollout of free wireless access on the Tube, the French have made a similar move.

News coming from Paris tells of a fresh initiative to bring free wireless access to public transport, bringing the city’s offering more in line with its cross-channel rival.

Thanks to WiFi provider GOWEX, a range of different public spaces across Paris will now have free wireless access — including railway stations, some RER commuter lines, and bus stops. It also includes three Metro stations: Place-d’Italie, Pont-de-Sèvres and Chaussée-d’Antin.

As Le Mondereports, it’s not perfect. But something, surely, is better than nothing:

The company claims that its service will eventually be deployed to other stations.

Access will only be possible in the stations themselves, not inside moving trains. Users wishing to use the free GOWEX service on their tablet or phone will have to install an application that states the rate will be 1Mbps.

There is already WiFi for some Metro travelers, thanks to an initiative from telco SFR that covers 50 stations. But that’s only for subscribers — not everyone. This move is much more like London, which is working with Virgin Media ahead of the Olympics to provide free access across some 80 underground stations.

And this is a trend that’s not just on one side of the Atlantic, either. On Tuesday Google (s GOOG) and Boingo teamed up to provide a similar service in six NYC stations in what’s being called “the summer of free Wi-Fi”. Some of the connectivity was already in place, but it’s an interesting move — although the implication of the marketing push is that when the summer comes to an end, so will the giveaway.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2012/06/27/first-london-now-paris-metro-gets-free-wifi/feed/6LeWeb London almost happened in San Franciscohttp://gigaom.com/2012/05/29/leweb-london-almost-happened-in-san-francisco/
http://gigaom.com/2012/05/29/leweb-london-almost-happened-in-san-francisco/#commentsTue, 29 May 2012 11:58:21 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=526340

Started more than seven years ago, the event now claims to be the industry’s most international shindig, and now it’s about to see its first spin-off, to be held in London next month.

But when I spoke to Le Meur a couple of days ago, he admitted to me that just a few months back it wasn’t the English Channel he wanted to cross with LeWeb — it was the Atlantic. He’d just started exploring the idea of starting a LeWeb for the Bay Area, where he has lived for the past five years.

“We had started to think about doing one in San Francisco,” Le Meur told me. “But then Cameron stepped in.”

By “Cameron” he means David Cameron, the British Prime Minister.

Reports have long suggested that the British government — keen to score a victory over their rivals in France — wanted to lure LeWeb to London. Le Meur says those rumors are accurate, but he never intended to move the entire conference away from Paris. However, he says, in the end, British politicos offered such a range of assistance that eventually meant the decision to set up a second, London-based event, was easy to make.

“It was a special request from Mr Cameron,” says Le Meur. “Last year I was was a Founders’ Forum event and I was very impressed because he shook me by the hand and said ‘Loic, you need to move Le Web to London.’ We’re not moving Le Web, and we had no plans for London just two months ago. But they’ve been so helpful that we couldn’t refuse.”

That helpfulness extended to a financial commitment, too, with Tech City Investment Organization (the body charged with drumming up publicity and investment for London’s startup scene ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games) acting as the first major sponsor for the event.

But anyone concerned that the U.K. government may end up underwriting the whole affair as it tries to woo European startups to London are misplaced, says Le Meur.

“They took a top-level sponsorship, but I would say it’s about 10 to 20 percent of the whole budget,” he says. “It’s very nice and one reason we decided to go to London, but we’re still taking a risk.”

Le Meur said that the early takeup for the event, which takes place on June 19th and 20th, shows there actually is “room and demand in London for us”, and that there is enough going on in the startup world to warrant a spinoff.

“Everything moves so fast in six months,” he says. “At LeWeb, nobody was talking about Pinterest. Instagram was on stage in Paris, but nobody cared very much.”